While this is fine, it disregards Blizzard who has the final say anyway, so I take them as guidance.
Not everything in Retail is bad and it is tiresome to have people use Retail as synonymous with bad.
It does invalidate it since it is behavior that already exists. It isn’t emergent behavior, people already get tossed loot that would otherwise go for DE “for OS” and it just rots in their bank, and they never respec. I have a dozen or so +Healing items in my bank mostly collecting dust but it could get used so I maintain it for the time being. Dual Spec doesn’t change that.
Not at all. People already port out and get summoned back if swaps between fights are a necessary thing, and speed running teams are already minimizing Tanks/Healers as is to the point of dangerously stacking too much onto singular Tanks/Healers. This doesn’t change the meta just because someone can swap inside out of combat, it just shortens the time of a practice already in place.
This is a guild matter, nothing more, and one that already exists with singular specs. Hybrids will always have a higher likelihood of being mandated to be a strict spec (since off-specs perform entirely different roles) than pure classes (since many pure DPS can still do more than is necessary to kill bosses regardless of spec). This doesn’t move the goalposts an iota and is grounded in the hybridness or lack thereof.
I’m fundamentally most useful to my raid by maintaining four sets of gear, something no other class can even try to say they can do the same. That fundamental difference between Druids and everyone else is one of class, not spec.
At a cost, it eliminates the need to seek out ramping cost retraining for routine and frequent spec changes between two explicit setups. The former Blizzard assumption was that specs were semi-set in stone strategic choices that were discouraged from swapping repeatedly, so the assumption by Blizzard was that if you wanted to do both PvE and PvP, you had better pick a hybridized set of talents and stick with it. This assumption was proven to be unequivocally poor as players preferred instead of to be ideally specialized for whatever content they did and would either stick to one area of play nearly exclusively (the majority of players) or outright ignore the cost of swapping and just swap very regularly (the minority of players). In neither case do you have people making strategic decisions about the talents themselves, as intended, but rather people were refusing to compromise their best performance.
This is why GC noted in his interview with Neth (who originally posted about talents being strategic decisions) that the old talent system was simply being circumvented, and that no amount of endless testing/tweaking/retuning was going to make it such that people would stop seeking out the inevitable best setups for respective roles or game modes.
It solves the problem of an archaic system that doesn’t actually do its intended job.
Oh please, this DK thread is a bad form of satire by a known #nochanges zealot.
Dual spec came about as a result of Vanilla and TBC.
DK’s came about as part of the lore/story of WotLK.
I don’t know why you keep insisting on treating unlike things as alike, but that kind of special pleading needs to stop.
This is only true if you obliterate all of the numerous differences in the two changes to reduce them down to merely “a change” which is absurd.
How?
It is neither, and you’re just being dismissive at this point. There is nothing speculative about Dual Spec not requiring new zones, areas, gear, or quests. This just appears trolling at this point.
Not all Dev time is created equal. I shouldn’t have to point this out.
This is shortsighted and speculative. Adding another 3-4 million health on Magtheridon doesn’t make him harder, it only makes him longer to kill, so you absolutely need something else added to his encounter if you want him to be a “harder” encounter. Adding another 3-4 million health to Gruul would fundamentally change his fight because he’s a soft-enrage fight and would require retuning to ensure players aren’t getting one-shot while doing high DPS and still having another half-mil to go.
Apparently it isn’t a joke to some.